Larian’s Swen Vincke Talks E3 Experience

In his latest blog post Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke talks about the company’s experience at E3, the tweaks they made to Divinity: Original Sin after its first showing to the press, and how the feedback they’ve received at E3 will help the title. Here’s a snip:

Arriving in LA, with a jetlag that received a boost from all those short nights, we spent two days rehearsing nearly every word. Realizing that some things still didn’t communicate as well as we’d wanted them to, we even fired up the game editors and changed things one day before the show.

I’m pretty sure most development directors reading this aren’t approving of this one bit. We could’ve gone with a slightly improved version of what we showed to PC Gamer a month before, and that would’ve worked too, because in the end they are the same games. However, reading the first coverage I think all the effort was really worth it.

For one, what I’m reading corresponds with what we wanted to tell. I’ve read previews in the past that didn’t do that at all. On top of that, reading what’s being written makes me want to try out the games. I’m not sure that was the case with the previous coverage. People are still being cautious, which makes sense given that they’ve only seen the games for 10 minutes, but they did seem enthusiastic . That I think only happened because for most of the things we told them, there was something happening on the screen that corresponded to the words we were saying.

I read an interview somewhere, I think with somebody who was formerly at EA, that he considered E3 & events like it a necessary evil to force focus on making the essence of a game crystalize. It’s painful for the development teams, buy it ensures that they don’t get sidetracked in features that aren’t important, and it stress-tests their development pipelines. That observation was clearly based on experience.

Prior to going to doing all these presentations, we were unsure ourselves about certain things, but this event forced us to think things through and decide about them. It also gave us a couple of new ideas which originated by discussing with industry people. The warrior skills in Divinity Original Sin for instance will undergo some change based on an idea a journalist gave us.